I write today to address the backlash taking shape against newcomer children who choose to take advantage of the school system in the Port, and who receive a wary and unfriendly reception within. I write as a newcomer myself. I am seventeen years old and as of writing this letter I have been in the Port nearly a year, which will become a year completely in August.
I have arrived having spent most of my life in the year westerners reckon as 1782, and naturally I have found most of the innovations that come with the modern world of the Port to be daunting. I turned to the school in the hopes of acclimating successfully to the Port, adapting myself to a new modern life and taking up my time in a productive way. I did not wish to do harm to anyone, nor did I wish to impose on the local children; obvious prejudice makes it difficult to feel any warmth towards a person and many of them exhibited prejudice and bullying behaviors towards newcomers. I wished to learn quietly and improve my chances of successfully adapting to the Port.
Honestly, I wonder sometimes what MAN truly hopes to accomplish with its cruel policies and the prejudice it imparts. For one, how would they like their own children to be welcomed, if these children were whisked away to another world wholesale? Obviously, this exists as a possibility. I wonder if they would want those local residents to treat them kindly and fairly, or to drive them out of towns and schools without a kind thought? I also wonder what good will truly come out of driving children away from schools. Young newcomers arrive at their most impressionable stage in life, and some of them mostly wish to adapt, learn and live quietly. Some newcomers may be criminals, but so are some Port residents; similarly, not all newcomer children wish to cause trouble. Through the schools, and in the younger years, is the ideal time to integrate newcomers as young citizens in the Port. Driving them away from the schools seems to me more likely to create more of what most Port residents despise: criminals and outsiders.
So many newcomers arrive hostile, it seems counterproductive to create more where none previously existed.
Personally, despite hard and unfriendly reception in the Port schools, I have not given up on acclimating. I will leave the public school system and turn to another school - a school with a curriculum taught and maintained by a newcomer, which I am certain will prove friendlier to my circumstances.
The Port has provided the apartments and a means of entering the workforce for newcomers, but so far I have seen the children done few favors. Schools are ideal places to integrate young newcomers and teach children already in difficulty what kinds of citizens the Port would like them to be. Turning them out of the school with prejudice and cruelty does not integrate newcomer children into their new world. It alienates them and embitters them, without producing adults that might be otherwise grateful to kind strangers, for the future.
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branchandroot
text; let's backdate this a bit to around a week after Ritsuka's request?
Date: 2011-08-12 07:20 am (UTC)[The following document is attached.]